News & Events

Table worship

Posted on February 26, 2011

Many religions (perhaps most?) associate some rituals and celebrations with the act of sharing a meal.

For Professor of Religion Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus the connection between food and religion is the stuff of scholarship. He examines the connection between dining and worship in his scholarship and in his teaching.

Among his projects is a translation of Shulhan Shel Arba, a treatise on eating by the 13th-century Spanish kabbalist and Biblical scholar, Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher. That work, now in an online draft, inspired Brumberg-Kraus to pen a brief essay about the book and its influence on his life.

The essay, which appears in the blog, The Jew and the Carrot, Brumberg-Kraus says: “

Like the Temple service, the table’s purpose is to help people have a relationship with each other and with God. And that’s exactly what this book has done for me: it has deepened and elevated my most important relationships with other people, and through them, with God, through the physical and sensory experiences of food and through talk at shared meals.